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Scene Last Night: Jaron Lanier, Anne-Marie Slaughter

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton professor and president of the New America Foundation, speaks at a panel during the Women's World Banking gala at the IAC Building in New York. Photographer: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg

The computer scientist with dreadlocks and an obsession
with collecting musical instruments was at a LIVE From the New
York Public Library event, sponsored by Morgan Stanley.

He played an Andean flute he had bought on his way over to
the library. Lanier also spoke about submitting personal
information online, to register or shop or connect on social
media. Companies use the data to profit, sell ads or adjust to
human behavior, he said. Government access also impinges on
privacy.

“The problem is you’re creating database entries that will
be aggregated into systems,” Lanier said. “Putting ourselves
into standard forms has become a form of disempowerment. So my
preference is to do things in such a way it’s very hard to be
categorized.”

Lanier, author of “Who Owns the Future?” and “You Are Not a
Gadget: A Manifesto,” is that rare insider/outsider. He’s
critical of a “big data” world he acknowledges he helped build.

Shortly after selling a company to Google Inc., Lanier was
at a Silicon Valley party where he ran into Sergey Brin, Google
Inc.’s co-founder, who offered him a job -- as long as he’d
promise not to be critical of Google.

Then “Bill Gates came over and said, ‘Every possible bad
thing that’s been said about Microsoft has already been said, so
come work for us,’” said Lanier, who still works there.

“I chalk it up to age. Google will get there.”

Changing Culture

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton professor who wrote
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in the Atlantic, said three
things can be done to change our male-dominant culture:

First, “When you read any newspaper and see the word
‘women,’ think to yourself, ‘the majority of the population,’
she said. Second, ‘Each time you talk about a male colleague who
has children, describe him as a ‘working father.’”

“The final thing is, the next time a man in the workplace
tells you that he and his wife are expecting a child, ask him
how he’s going to be managing that,” Slaughter said. “Ask him
how he’s going to juggle his new responsibilities.”

Slaughter made the remarks during panel discussion at the
Women’s World Banking gala on Oct. 9. As for women not having it
all, she clarified the point she’d made in an essay in the
Atlantic: “I said you can’t have it all unless you are rich,
superhuman and in charge of your own time.”

(Amanda Gordon is a writer and photographer for Muse, the
arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Any opinions
expressed are her own.)

Muse highlights include the London and New York weekend
guides, Warwick Thompson on U.K. theater, Lewis Lapham on
history, Jeremy Gerard on U.S. theater, and Greg Evans and Craig
Seligman on movies.

To contact the writer on this story:
Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net or on
Twitter at @amandagordon.